Manessier makes no special reference to the properties of the Grail.
In the B versions it is the spiritual power of the Grail which is dwelt upon. Christ’s words to Joseph have already been quoted (supra, [p. 71]), and the use which the latter puts the Grail to, and which is specially indicated to Joseph by the Holy Ghost, is in accordance with them. The Grail is to serve him as a touchstone to distinguish the sinners of his company—
Car il n’a à nul pecheour
Ne compaignie ne amour; (2,629-30)
whereas to those who have not defiled themselves with sin it brings
La douceur, l’accomplissement
De leur cueurs tout entièrement; (2,565-67)
so that according to them—
... Cuers ne pourroit,
A pourpenser ne soufiroit
Le grant delit que nous avuns
Ne la grant joie en quoi nous suns. (2,609-12)
This testing power of the Grail is especially brought into play when the vessel is placed on the table in connection with the fish which Brons caught, and which won him the name of the Rich Fisher.
C, Didot-Perceval, has only one reference, “ne il ne covient mie en sa compagnie pechier” (I, 483), agreeing with B and with Gautier’s lines 28,079-80.
In D, Queste, we revert to the physical gifts of the Grail. “And as soon as it entered the door of the hall the whole court was filled with perfumes ... and it proceeded to every place in the hall. And as it came before the tables it filled them with every kind of meat that a man would wish to have.” When it comes in, “Every one looked at each other, and there was not one that could say a single word;” when it goes out, “Every one recovered his speech” (D II, pp. 442-43). There is no allusion to a gathering at which the Grail is used to test the state of grace of its devotees. E, Grand St. Graal, shows a curious mixture of the two ideas; the Grail feeds its worshippers, but only those who are “de sainte vie,” to them it bring “toutes le boines viandes ke cuers d’omme pourroit penser,” but “li pecheour n’auoient ke mangier.” This version shows itself here, as in so many other passages, one of the latest in date, embodying and reconciling as it does the conceptions of the older versions—conceptions which it is difficult to derive, either from a common source or from one another. If it were not for the solitary phrase of Gautier’s, lines 28,079, etc. (a passage which affords the strongest proof against the homogeneity of that part of the Conte du Graal which goes under Gautier’s name), there would be an unbroken chain of testimony as to the food-giving power of the Grail on the part of the earlier A versions, supported by the Queste in opposition to the spiritual gifts insisted on by the B and E, Grand St. Graal, forms. It is in any case difficult to believe that if the writer of the Queste, with his strong tendency to mystic allegory, had had before him the highly spiritual presentment of the Grail-power found in B, he would have neglected it in favour of the materialistic description he uses. In one point this version differs from all others, the dumbness with which the Grail strikes those to whom it appears.[50]